Public Dramas and the Politics of Justice

Abstract

Low-wage, nonstandard service work is an expanding sector of employment in today’s global economy. Although scholars document its effects on increasing poverty and inequality, few studies examine how peripherally employed workers respond to the erosion of their living and working conditions under new forms of employment-centered poverty. Through comparative ethno-graphic case studies of university janitors in South Korea and the United States, the author analyzes how one group of low-wage, nonstandard service workers is transforming their structural marginality into new sources of moral and material leverage. The author argues that unions are staging public dramas that redefine a particular labor dispute into broader violations over justice. Two factors are key to this process: cultivating associational power and symbolic leverage.